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Abstract

An ultrafast all-optical temporal integrator is experimentally demonstrated. The demonstrated integrator is based on a very simple and practical solution only requiring the use of a widely available all-fiber passive component, namely a reflection uniform fiber Bragg grating (FBG). This design allows overcoming the severe speed (bandwidth) limitations of the previously demonstrated photonic integrator designs. We demonstrate temporal integration of a variety of ultrafast optical waveforms, including Gaussian, odd-symmetry Hermite Gaussian, and (odd-)symmetry double pulses, with temporal features as fast as ~6-ps, which is about one order of magnitude faster than in previous photonic integration demonstrations. The developed device is potentially interesting for a multitude of applications in all-optical computing and information processing, ultrahigh-speed optical communications, ultrafast pulse (de-)coding, shaping and metrology.

Experimentally measured input and output temporal waveforms for different integration experiments: integration of an OS-HG input pulse (a), integration of odd-symmetry double-pulse waveforms with different input inter-pulse delays (b, c), and integration of a symmetric double pulse (d). In each plot, the top sub-plot (named by the suffix ‘-i’) shows the signal launched at the input of the FBG (integrator) whereas the bottom sub-plot (named by the suffix ‘-o’) shows the signal reflected from the FBG (integrator output), illustrating the integration time window with a gray box and also presenting the theoretical (numerical) time integral of the measured input complex envelope along the integration window (curve with red hollow circles). In each sub-plot, the measured temporal intensity profile is represented with a solid blue line and the measured temporal phase profile is represented with a dashed red line.